As I understand it MS dominated indie gaming this generation for two reasons.

1) For the first few years of the generation they had the only game in town, for the first year of the 360 it really was the only game in town. Sony didn't really even try to court indie developers for a long time, and their online store was well behind MS's for years. MS had far more users buying digital downloads at the start of the cycle.

2) MS's draconian acceptance policies on indie games forced indie developers to commit to the smaller PSN market place or exclusivity on XBox. As I understand it MS's policy was basically they get the game first, they get the game looking as good as it will look, they get the game with all the features it will have, or it doesn't go on their system.

It is increasingly clear now that Sony is the one who learned from past mistakes, while MS has largely stuck to their existing policies and only changed when forced. It is also becoming clear that a lot of indie developers were not happy with their relationship with MS. MS is increasingly being revealed as a nightmare to work with, and actively obstructive to indie developers. This generation they could get away with that kind of thing, that doesn't look to be the case for the next generation. I've no doubt they'll eventually cave on the self publishing issue, like they've caved on most things prior to Xbone's launch. I suspect MS will also have to drop their draconian acceptance policy, because there's a good chance they won't be dominating the market next gen, they won't have a year head start, they won't have a rival without a comprehensive online sales plan and indie policy, they won't have a significantly easier to work with platform and they are seriously lagging behind when it comes to courting the indie community.

From my perspective as a software developer (not game dev), if I decided I wanted to create a game on PS3 or 360 then the choice would be easy. 360, hands down. Why? Two reasons.

1. Much simpler. When I was working on my masters in comp science, I gave PS3 programming a shot. Wow. Nevermind the complex CPU, just trying to figure out the development environment was ridiculous. Now I am not sure that indies had to use the same tools I did, but I did read many complaints about poor availability/quality of tools for the PS3 along the way and from what I saw, yeah, it sucked.

2. 360 is more native. I use Visual Studio every day at work and that is the same dev environment programmers for the 360 use. So naturally, I would already know my way around and could probably get something very simple up in a relatively short amount of time. Plus, I already know C# very well. Would need to learn XNA and graphics dev, but still the learning curve is much smaller.

So what about going forward? PS4 developers will also have the luxury of using Visual Studio as their dev environment so that is a huge obstacle removed. Of course, I doubt getting started on PS4 is as simple as downloading XNA or whatever other components indie developers need. I understand there is a process to get approved to work on the PS4 which will then give the devs access to the development library and any additional tools they need. So whereas MS makes it easier to get started, with the self-publishing, Sony is making it much easier for devs to "ship" their product. No need to latch on to a major publisher for something that is never really "published". just submit the game to Sony and wait for approval.

No predictions here, but I think indies definitely have more options this time around.

From my perspective as a software developer (not game dev), if I decided I wanted to create a game on PS3 or 360 then the choice would be easy. 360, hands down. Why? Two reasons.

1. Much simpler. When I was working on my masters in comp science, I gave PS3 programming a shot. Wow. Nevermind the complex CPU, just trying to figure out the development environment was ridiculous. Now I am not sure that indies had to use the same tools I did, but I did read many complaints about poor availability/quality of tools for the PS3 along the way and from what I saw, yeah, it sucked.

2. 360 is more native. I use Visual Studio every day at work and that is the same dev environment programmers for the 360 use. So naturally, I would already know my way around and could probably get something very simple up in a relatively short amount of time. Plus, I already know C# very well. Would need to learn XNA and graphics dev, but still the learning curve is much smaller.

So what about going forward? PS4 developers will also have the luxury of using Visual Studio as their dev environment so that is a huge obstacle removed. Of course, I doubt getting started on PS4 is as simple as downloading XNA or whatever other components indie developers need. I understand there is a process to get approved to work on the PS4 which will then give the devs access to the development library and any additional tools they need. So whereas MS makes it easier to get started, with the self-publishing, Sony is making it much easier for devs to "ship" their product. No need to latch on to a major publisher for something that is never really "published". just submit the game to Sony and wait for approval.

No predictions here, but I think indies definitely have more options this time around.

More options is fantastic, in all honesty, the barriers to entry were so huge, even with the 360, that it was like banging your head against a brick wall. A wall which just about broke me as a indie to be honest. Our title would never have made a good pc game, but an ideal console game. Begging to publishers is something which I hated.